press her sorrows, and to write gay accounts of her health and spirits to her friends in England, had swallowed the fatal draught by design. It was said so publicly, and thence believed—perhaps generally.
To this succeeded a report, of even a more revolting nature, a suspicion so dark, that without the strongest colour of reason, it would be criminal as well as torturing to entertain it. It was connected with a circumstance already adverted to as having been communicated to L. E. L. before her marriage; the existence at Cape Coast, though at many miles distance from the Castle, of one who, with her child, had formerly been its inhabitant; and hence to those whose minds reverted to the hot blood and the fierce habits of the natives of Western Africa, the dreadful suggestion was presented, that the English intruder at the governor's residence, the European lady of the colony, had been sacrificed to a horrible spirit of female vengeance. This was the darkest picture the mind could dwell upon, and it was therefore, at least as attractive, and as generally favoured, as the other gloomy hypothesis.
A request was then publicly made on the part of the head of Mr. Maclean's family in England, and the nearest relative of the deceased, that all who respected and lamented her, would abstain from adding to the many idle and distressing speculations relative to her fate. They represented, that, far from the morbid or melancholy temperament which had been, most erroneously, ascribed to her, all who were more familiarly acquainted with her, could bear witness to the cheerfulness and gaiety of her natural disposition, which even care and trouble could only temporarily obscure.
